Parliamentary Questions

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department in respect of how many parliamentary questions a substantive answer was not provided by his Department wholly or partly on the ground of disproportionate cost in each of the last 18 months(a) in total and (b) as a proportion of questions answered.

If we tried to answer the hon. Member's question it would, therefore, involve an exercise of checking through some 6,000 parliamentary questions. This would in itself entail costs to the taxpayer out of all proportion to the significance of the question.